Featured Post

You May Not Care About War . . .

By Scott Sumner | Dec 30 2023
. . . but war cares about you. For several years, I’ve been warning that the rise in nationalism will lead to more war. And now it’s happening.  Here’s Bloomberg: This week, the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London published the latest edition of its authoritative annual Armed Conflict Survey, and it’s not predicting much ...

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Central Planning

Two types of new cities

By Scott Sumner | Jan 13, 2024

Bloomberg has an interesting article discussing two types of Chinese new cities: In 1979, Deng Xiaoping drew a circle on the map around China’s southern coast and created Shenzhen, an experiment in capitalism, according to a popular ode to the former leader. Nearly four decades later, Xi Jinping unveiled his own ambition for an era-defining city, this time perched .. MORE

Education

How Timur Kuran Changed My Thinking

By David Henderson | Jan 13, 2024

Why does the adult world seem a lot like high school? Duke University economics professor Timur Kuran has received some deserved publicity lately because of his insights into preference falsification.  He recently tweeted about an article in the Wall Street Journal by James Freeman, who cites a promotional blurb that, tweets Kuran, “describes both the .. MORE

History of Economic Thought

Milton Friedman Was an Infuriating Man

By David Henderson | Jan 12, 2024

  You take my friend Fenwick. He is an exceedingly loveable little man. His disposition is so sunny, his character so open, that even the Most Hardened Cynics, of whom my wife is International Chairman, call Fenwick “utterly adorable.” He is the very incarnation of the Boy Scout creed: “trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, .. MORE

Economic Growth

Does Consumption-Led Growth Exist?

By Scott Sumner | Jan 11, 2024

Many western experts have argued that China should switch from a model of investment-led growth to consumption-led growth. Some of their criticism of wasteful Chinese investment seems valid, but it’s not obvious that “more consumption” is the way to think about this issue.  Some articles give the impression that there is one group of economists .. MORE

Book Club

Capitalism is Corrigible

By Amy Willis | Jan 11, 2024

People often look at my collection of Liberty Fund books and ask me whether I’ve read them all. I laugh. I wish I could say I’d read all of just the economics titles! (I am a firm believer in the art of tsundoku…) So I was delighted when Pete Boettke chose Arthur Seldon’s under-appreciated The .. MORE

Economic Growth

How Malthus Got It Wrong

By David Henderson | Jan 11, 2024

  Something that seems obvious if you think about it for a minute is that a growing population pushing on a finite planet means that resources will become pricier and people will become, on average, poorer. In 2019, Bill Maher, for example, who most people, including me, think is a smart person, stated, “In 1900, .. MORE

Related Post

The Unbearable Lightness of Collectivism

By Pierre Lemieux | Jan 4 2024

Our sister website Law & Liberty published an article by Oren Cass, a defender of protectionism (“Free Trade’s Original Myth,” January 3). It is an interesting piece although, I suggest, more from a rhetorical than a social-scientific or even simply logical viewpoint. Let me just discuss one irredeemable flaw. Social anthropomorphism is a first symptom. .. MORE

Featured Comment

Your article is interesting. It shows that with every president back to Reagan they all pass more "economically significant" regs in their last year of office, even Reagan though his increase was less. It looks..

steve, January 9

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Book Club

Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings

Against Ideological Certainty

I recently completed a multi-post deep dive into the book Conservatism: A Rediscovery by Yoram Hazony. My own views have relatively little alignment with Hazony on many significant issues. Yet, I suspect that may not have come across in the review itself – my review, I believe, cast Hazony’s work in a very positive light. .. MORE

Labor Market

Claudia Goldin: A Personal Appreciation

I don’t remember when I first encountered Claudia Goldin’s work, but I do know that the first piece of hers that I read was her Ely lecture, titled, “The Quiet Revolution that Transformed Women’s Employment, Education, and Family.”  It blew me away. And it blew me away not just because it was one of the .. MORE

Cost-benefit Analysis

Adam Smith on Lotteries

  One of my delights in preparing my recent talk on Adam Smith‘s Wealth of Nations, a talk I’ll post in the next few days, is that I read substantial sections of the book that I hadn’t read before. Whereas I have sometimes thought his prose bogs down, I found many instances with terse, crystal-clear .. MORE

Book Reviews and Suggested Readings

Battle of the Sexes

By Arnold Kling

Societies that have finished moulding themselves according to the patrilineal principle have indeed experienced a long and slow tragic cycle. After having invented everything—writing, the state… the first economic globalization, in the Bronze Age—they got bogged down. This great inertia, which we then see in China and India, and in Africa… is one of the .. MORE

Economic Lessons for Children from The Hunger Games

By Matthew Rousu

The fourth and final Hunger Games movie was released on November 20, bringing the second part of the third book (Mockingjay1) to the big screen. While I’ve found these books and movies entertaining, the value of this enterprise isn’t limited to entertainment. The Hunger Games might contain the best depiction of communism and its cousin—socialism—ever .. MORE

The Entrepreneurial Justice of the Market Process

By Rosolino Candela

A Liberty Classic Book Review of Discovery, Capitalism, and Distributive Justice, by Israel M. Kirzner.1 Can the distribution of income generated by the market process be regarded as just? The answer to that question depends on the extent to which economic theory accounts for the role of the entrepreneur in the market process. Israel Kirzner .. MORE

A Keynesian’s Macroeconomic History

By Arnold Kling

One main reason why rational expectations macroeconomics, in particular its implication that the Phillips Curve for anticipated changes in money is vertical even in the short run, caught on was the allegation that the incumbent Keynesian tradition had failed to either control or explain high inflation. “Failed to control,” I suppose, is true, though the .. MORE